A past as a manager at the helm of a successful hi-tech company Naftali Bennett, millionaire leader of Yamina, 49 years a day, has not only taken hold of the religious-nationalist electorate with his rhetoric. The hi-tech world from which he comes, and which has made his fortune, also helps to attract lay people. In its past there is the world of cyber-security, with an anti-fraud software company, Cyota, founded in 1999 and sold in 2005 for 145 million dollars. The following year he became chief of staff of Benjamin Netanyahu, at the time in the opposition. A few years later, after leaving the Likud leader (apparently following a hard fight with his powerful wife, Sara), he goes to the head of the Yesha Council, the body that represents the settlers’ requests. Former leader of the Jewish Focolare, who became Yamina in 2018, he was also at the helm of the Ministry of Education and Economy, before joining the Ministry of Defense, also under Netanyahu, of which he has long been considered the protegee.
During the election campaign, he claimed his managerial training to “heal” the Israeli economy in crisis due to the Covid epidemic; his recipe is centered on tax cuts and deregulation. In the middle there was a support for the annexation of part of the West Bank. In 2013, he argued that Palestinian terrorists should be “killed, not released”; he also stated that there was no occupation of the West Bank since “there has never been a Palestinian state here”. More recently he urged to “put aside politics and issues such as annexation or a Palestinian state, and focus on taking control of the coronavirus pandemic, healing the economy and repairing internal rifts”. And again, he insisted that «the main thing we need today is entrepreneurship, energy and the management of national crises». As for the future, he did not want to give clear-cut indications: he repeatedly reiterated his intention to send the current prime minister home, with the aim of governing at the head of another right-wing coalition; at the same time, he did not rule out the hypothesis of sitting in an anti-Netanyahu government, except with centrist leader Yair Lapid, too “left” for him; he still remembers his attacks on settlers during his expulsion from Gush Atif “to Gaza in 2005.” I will give birth to a government, we will only replace Netanyhu from the right, not from the left. “The country is divided into two” cults “, pro-Netanyahu and anti-Netanyahu, he added. “I have decided not to belong to either of them. We have to replace him, because he has failed deeply as a leader and in management for the last year or two. It is time to say ‘Thank you. , goodbye, it’s Bennett’s time ».